Alex Rocco on CANNONBALL RUN II
Back in January, I posted a piece about Alex Rocco…or to be more specific, it was a piece adapted from one of several conversations I had with Rocco back when he was toying with the idea of writing a memoir. When I posted that piece, I mentioned that I might eventually offer up another one, and while I finish working on my next Pilot Error article and wait to schedule the next twosome for Just a Couple of Characters, this seems like a good time to do just that. I’m still limiting the stuff I share to the entertaining, non-controversial stories, but rest assured that this is still plenty entertaining…and more importantly, it’s another one where, if you know what Rocco sounded like, you’ll absolutely be able to hear him telling it.
Enjoy!
Alex Rocco on… CANNONBALL RUN II
One of my most prized possessions—and when you find out what it is, it won’t surprise you a bit that I cherish it so much—is a picture of me with Frank Sinatra. I’ve got it framed and everything. It was one of the biggest thrills of my life. Okay, so the picture we met on wasn’t so hot, but at least it was fun.
There wasn’t much to my role in Cannonball Run II, really, beyond just playing on my history with mob movies. They teamed me with Michael Gazzo, Henry Silva, and Abe Vigoda, and we all played gangsters who worked for the dreaded Don Don Cannelloni, played by Charles Nelson Reilly, who sent us to retrieve the money owed to him by Jamie Blake (Dean Martin) and Morris Fenderbaum (Sammy Davis, Jr.).
I was working every day and into the night with Dean and Sammy, who were more or less all through the film. Frank, on the other hand, only did a single day’s work on the film, and when he arrived on the set, it was by helicopter, like God descending from the heavens. You can’t say the guy didn’t know how to make an appearance.
Henry Silva was an old friend of mine, because we both used to play gangsters all the time. I also knew he’d done Ocean’s 11—we’re talking the original 1961 version, of course—so I said, “Look, I know you know Frank. Please, before I die, you gotta please, please, please introduce me!” (I don’t think I told Henry at the time, but I always thought I should’ve been part of the Rat Pack, anyway. I just knew they would’ve loved me.)
Henry didn’t hesitate. We headed straight over to Frank’s trailer, and when we walked through the door, there were Dean, Sammy, Shirley MacLaine, Frank’s wife, Barbara, and—standing over by a stove—Frank himself.
My heart was about to beat right out of my chest when Henry introduced me and said, “Alex Rocco, say hi to Frank.”
I shook Frank’s hand, and I did, he looked in my eyes—he had those piercing blue eyes—and it felt like he was studying me. Actually, it felt more like a retinal scan. That’s how intense it was. But then he said, “Why don’t you sit down? I’m making pasta.”
Somehow I managed to stammer, “Okay, thanks,” and I took a seat a bit away from everyone else and just sat and listened. It was wonderful.
As Frank’s stirring the pasta, he’d say something to Dean or Sammy like, “Why didn’t you tell me Angie Dickinson was in the hospital?” and one of ‘em would say, “Oh, I thought you knew.” “Well, how can I send flowers or candy if nobody tells me what’s going on?”
I know it sounds mundane to read it, but coming from the mouths of the Rat Pack, it was the highlight of the film for me. I know, that’s not saying much, given the film, but you know what I mean. I mean, it was Frank, Dean, and Sammy. I thought it was some of the most exciting shit I’d ever heard!
When Frank went to the set, I wasn’t in the scene with him—it was just Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise—but I was staring through a gaffer’s ladder, watching him film it. Barbara Sinatra was there, too, watching me stare lovingly at the guy whose music I’d made love to as a teenager, and she gave Frank the high sign, some sort of signal.
Frank suddenly said, “Hey, buddy!”
My reaction was straight out of a movie: I looked over my left shoulder, looked over my right shoulder, and then looked back at Frank and said, “Me?”
“Yeah, you,” he said. “C’mere.”
I went over to him, feeling like a little school boy being called to the principal’s office, thinking, “Well, that’s what I get for spying on his scene…”
He said, “You wanna take a picture?”
I don’t know if I blushed, but I do know what I said back to him: “Oh, Mr. Sinatra, I would love that.”
Henry Silva was nearby, so I called him over to be in the picture, too, since he was the one who’d introduced us, and I put Frank in the middle, with Henry to his left and me to his right.
“No, no, no,” Frank said to me. “It’s your picture, you go in the middle.”
That’s just the kind of guy Frank was.
Sammy, Dean, Dom, and I would go out to dinner with the director, Hal Needham. Dom was crazy. Every time he walked into a restaurant, he’d scream, “Who’s got the cocaine?” We’d all shrink in our seats and go, “All right, keep it down, Dom, keep it down…”
Sammy and I, we had a game going where we’d challenge each other to come up with the actors and the characters they played in various movies. For instance, he’d say, “Kiss of Death,” and then if he said, “Tommy Udo,” I’d have to say, “Richard Widmark!” Or if he said, “Nick Bianco,” then I’d have to say, “Victor Mature!” Sammy and I would play this game for drinks all the way through the film. Unfortunately, he was good at it and I wasn’t, which was one of the reasons why he liked me so much. At one point, he took me to his house, where I remember he showed me some guns that John Wayne had given him—a couple of Western long .44s—that he’d had framed.
Dean was another story. He was just as laid back as he used to come across on TV and in the movies.
One day when we were working together, he swaggered up and asked me, “When are we goin’ to lunch?” Because I knew he was from Naples (or at least his people were), I decided to be cute and replied, “Mezz’ora,” which means, “Half an hour.” At this, Dean’s eyes lit up, and because he thought he’d finally found somebody on the set who could speak his language, he started talking fluent Italian to me. Problem was, although I could piece together some of the stuff he was saying because of my mother’s family, who also came from the Naples area, I can’t actually speak more than a few words of Italian. Somehow, either because he was so stoned or because I was, we managed to get through the conversation, but I never had the heart to tell him that half the time I didn’t know what the hell he was saying.
We did a lot of crazy stuff behind the scenes on Cannonball Run II, just because it was a long shoot and we got so bored. Dom loved to cook in his hotel room, and every time we went by his door, we could smell some of the great stuff he was fixing. One time, Charles Nelson Reilly and I were walking by when he was whipping up some peppers and sausages, and we decided to call Dom’s room and tell him that there was a package for him in the lobby and that he had to come down to the front desk to sign for it. While he was downstairs, we broke into his room and stole his peppers and sausages, frying pan and all. He was so pissed that he reported it to the production office. (He blamed Dean and Sammy for it, though.)
Like I said before, Cannonball Run II might not have been the greatest film in the world, but it sure was fun.